Cloudflare

Context I often run into this problem: I have a local file on my computer that I want to share with a friend or colleague on the other side of the world. While I could upload it to a file sharing service, it’s can be very annoying to have to upload it somewhere first, especially if it’s a one-off situation and if the file is big. More over, it’s my data and I don’t necessarily want to upload it to a Google or Dropbox server. Similarly, when I’m developing a web application on my local machine, I often want to show it to someone else for testing or feedback. Again, uploading it to a public server can be cumbersome and I don’t want to start dealing with a deployment strategy if I just stated prototyping. ...

For a while, I wanted to set up an Ubuntu archive mirror using Cloudflare. It felt like a natural idea: the archive is a set of static files that could be easily cached, and Cloudflare is very good at caching files close to users around the world. What is an archive mirror? If you have ever run apt update on Ubuntu, you have used the archive. It is a big collection of files: packages (.deb files) and index files (Packages.gz, Release, etc.) that tell apt what is available. ...